Fritzi Brod
1900-1952

Fritzi Brod was born in Prague in 1900 to Jewish parents, growing up in luxury, attending private schools, and traveling to art and music centers in Austria and Germany where she was greatly affected by the European modernists – in particular by Egon Schiele. By 1924 she married American businessman Oswald Brod and moved to Chicago.

Fritzi Brod was particularly adept at sketching, drawing, and painting the female form, combining it with both abstract and decorative motifs. Her sensuous and pensive images with imaginative and creative textile designs were critically acclaimed at Chicago’s first outdoor art fair in 1932. A few years later, art critic C. J. Bulliet of the Chicago Daily News described how her work “equates beautiful flowers and beautiful women—of equal consequence, of identical aroma.”

Not surprisingly, she was an accomplished textile designer creating some of the earliest modernist patterns exhibited at the Marshall Field’s department store in Chicago. Brod’s innovative textile designs gained her a great reputation in the American fashion world. She wrote several design books, including 200 Motifs and Design, Flowers in Nature and Design, and Decorative Design.

Today, Fritzi Brod is exhibited and collected across the United States as a Chicago modernist, a female artist, and designer.  Her works are in the permanent collections of The Art Institute of Chicago, The Smithsonian American Art Museum, the National Gallery of Art, Washington, and the Whitney Museum of Ar